United States vs China: number of internet users

Here are a few charts I put together when researching the reasons for eBay's failure in China. It shows the total number of internet users in China and the United States.

As we can see, China accelerated past the United States from about 2006 onward. By 2008, China had comfortably overtaken the U.S. with 299 million users, compared with 225 million in the America.

These days, China has comfortably more than double the number of internet users than there are in the U.S. It has 571 million internet users, whereas the U.S. has 254 million users.

But the raw count of internet users only tells half the story. Or should I say 42 per cent of the story. The other factor is the penetration rate i.e. the percentage of the population that use the internet.

The chart above shows the total population of both China and the United States. The darker colours represent the number of internet users and the lighter colours represent the non-internet using population.

Only 42 per cent of people in China were internet users in 2012. However this is a staggering rise considering that less than 2 per cent of the population were internet users in 2000. The amount of headroom remaining for growth is phenomenal. No wonder so many Western companies want a piece of this big, tasty steamed pork bun.

Having been to China a few times I can personally vouch for the ubiquity of the internet and associated technologies such as smartphones. Certainly in the larger cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen.

However, I have also experienced the Great Firewall of China at first hand. Sites such as Facebook and Twitter are inaccessible in China. Local alternatives, such as Sina Weibo, with over half a billion registered users, have cropped up as a consequence.

So, the most popular non-Chinese sites are blocked in the country. The Chinese language makes Chinese sites essentially inaccessible for outsiders. Yet, as we can see above, almost a  quarter of the world's internet users are in China. And that percentage is growing fast. Where exactly is the true internet again?


Chinese keywords: 互联网用户数, 中国, 美国
Sources: International Telecommunications Union for internet penetration figures and the World Bank for populations.

The Australian election debate: a Twitter event

The televised debate between Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott increase the amount of Australian election tweets by a factor of about 19. The event, which started at 6:30pm on Sunday 11th August, saw over 50,000 tweets while it was in progress.

As mentioned in my previous post, I collected a lot of tweets during the Australian election debate between Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott. Although I had expected an increase in the amount of tweets, I didn't expect such a massive increase.

The massive increase in volume of Australian election tweets is shown in the chart above. The chart shows the day of the debate, plus the two preceding days for comparison. Between 6pm and 8pm on the night of the debate, I collected a massive 71,263 Australian election tweets. The same hours on the previous night saw only 3,755 tweets sent - meaning that the debate increased the volume by about 19 times.

A key driver of this engagement was clearly the interactive elements encouraged by the media networks. Most networks, including the ABC, Channel Nine and Channel Ten had their own unique hashtags to allow their viewers to tweet their votes. This form of engagement, straddling both traditional and new media, was clearly effective for the broadcasters.

Rudd vs Abbott debate, minute by minute in Tweets

Towards the end of tonight's Australian election debate between Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott, I captured almost 2,000 related Twitter tweets per minute, and over 50,000 were captured during the hour. This has provided me with a mountain of data - so first off, let's look at the debate minute-by-minute.

In the chart above, we can see the subjects mentioned in tweets during the debate. The first spike in tweets was about immigration, after about ten minutes of the debate. A much larger spike in activity belonged to the economic discussion, at about 18 minutes.

The economy remained one of the most popular topics of discussion for the rest of the debate, except on three occasions. In the 23rd and 48th minutes, immigration and then the environment briefly overtook the economy as the most tweeted topic.

However, with only four of the sixty minutes remaining, the subject of same-sex marriage suddenly came up. This caused a spike from mere single digits to a massive 676 tweets per minute. This was more than double the maximum number of tweets per minute seen for the economy, immigration and the environment during the debate.

The ABC and Channel Nine each asked their viewers to use hashtags to identify who they thought had won the debate. The above chart tracks the number of tweets with each hashtag per minute.

Until about the tenth minute, it was fairly even. However, it appears that the audience on Twitter started to give Kevin Rudd the edge from that point onward. Rudd's votes continued to trend upwards, peaking at 119 Twitter votes during the 56th minute - the same time as the spike in tweets about same-sex marriage.

Votes for the leader of the opposition, Tony Abbott, peaked at 47 tweets per minute on two occasions during the debate. However, generally his votes plateaued in the low-30s for the latter half of the debate, significantly below the volume of support received by Rudd.

This post was subsequently republished on the SBS News site, with the authorisation of the author.